


Coup de Coeur

by TheLastStarkInWinterfell



Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Art Theft, Copious Crime References, Detective, Detective Thief AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:48:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26455132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLastStarkInWinterfell/pseuds/TheLastStarkInWinterfell
Summary: Eight years after reaching New York, Theo Decker is a forensic accountant working for an agency specializing in art crimes.  Everything is going well, until a painting he thought had been lost forever resurfaces unexpectedly, and he's called in to help track it down.  Suddenly he must balance finding and restoring the painting with keeping himself off the legal record, and things only become more complicated when he learns the thief he is hunting is another face he never thought he would see again.
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky, boreo - Relationship
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	1. Prologue

When I had first made it back to New York, three days into Hobie’s prescribed diet of echinacea and chicken soup, I made for the painting. I was still shaky with fever, sometimes losing track of if I was in New York or Vegas, the faint scent of dog hair and aftershave that still clung to Welty’s old blankets sending me spiralling back down into Boris’s cigarette burnt bedding, pushing me into the pillow until I choked for air. I kept seeing visions of my painting- plucked out of my bag by a seatmate on the bus, abandoned in a puddle where it had slipped out of my arms while I ran, and they were so vivid behind my eyes that I was increasingly certain that they had happened. That I was only just now remembering a great calamity that was so terrible my brain had blocked it out, the same as people so excited to be pulling into their driveway they completely failed to see the truck bearing down on them until the moment of impact. I stumbled out of bed and struggled to stay on my feet, blanket wrapped around my shoulders, and dug through my clothes until I found it. Comfortingly bulky and layers of masking tape still gloriously intact.

All he had was a rusted pair of nail scissors, and I held them awkwardly in my trembling hand, brandishing them open so the mostly blunt blade pressed into my fingers, leaving streaks of rust where my sweaty skin chafed against the metal. I had to jab violently, pinching my fingers, to work the tip of the blade into the tape, and once I had my opening I went at with my chewed and torn fingernails. I had to see it. I needed to remind myself of the delicacy of the chain around its ankle, the way those glinting black eyes centered me in the midst of the world. It was as though I knew I wouldn’t be able to understand the way light shone anywhere in the world if I couldn’t recall the way it played against this little bird’s wings. I tore through layer after layer like some starving madman digging into the belly of his companion. There was a streak of blood across the back of my hand where I’d misjudged a slice and nicked myself, and I could smell the metallic taste of that mingling with the sweat and steel and the burning plastic of masking tape. 

The scissors suddenly sank as I hit paper instead of plastic, and I yanked at the gash eagerly. Even borderline delirious with fever something felt off, the texture of the newspaper against the top of the painting wrong and unfamiliar. I ignored the uncertainty that told me to wait, to take a deep breath and prepare myself and instead I tore again, ripping the newspaper clean in half to reveal, like curtains opening to the final act of a play, my painting.

But of course, it wasn’t. Instead, I was holding a textbook, cover emblazoned with smiling pixellated faces, one slashed violently where my scissors had dug too deep. I opened it, as if I hoped it was merely a careful decoy, but my goldfinch wasn’t hidden inside. Instead, written across the inner cover in both English and Cyrillic, a sharpie scrawl that took up half the page was, of course:

BORIS PAVLIKOVSKY

A wave of nausea so intense I couldn’t form thought swept over me. I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched the Civics book as the world bucked around me, the darkness behind my eyelids seething and flashing. If I was well enough to move, I decided, I would jab those nail scissors into my jugular. But my muscles were clenched and immobile. I was paralyzed beneath the weight of everything that had been taken from me, my bird, my painting, my mother, my goldfinch, and I clenched my fists against the hardwood trying to keep steady. I wanted to be electrified with anger, to suddenly have the will to storm back to Vegas, find whoever had my bird and pry her out of his fingers. I wanted to crush skulls. But instead I just felt despair, something stepping on my lungs, and I stayed hunched on my knees on the floor, book digging into my stomach, until in a stupor I did the only thing I felt like I could do, and hauled myself back into Welty’s bed.

I curled on my side, textbook clenched against my chest, and wondered if this was all a fever dream, and I would wake to find myself curled around my painting, but I knew that wasn’t true, and I knew I was alone, and there, lying in the darkness churning with worry over who had it and what they were doing with it and who they were giving it to but too sick and exhausted to do anything other than sleep, I knew that I would get it back someday.

  
  



	2. Chapter 1

My supervisor had handed me the first manila folder with an apology that he hadn’t managed to get all the paperwork together just yet. Apparently everything had happened so fast that they hadn’t even made copies of all the FBI files, so I’d better be careful not to get fingerprints on those, they were going to the entire office. I flicked through the papers as he talked, barely glancing over the headlines. Miami, a grainy photo of a stucco house with a wire chicken coop out front. Looked like it had been taken out of a car window.

“It was an absolute catastrophe,” my supervisor said over my shoulder, as if the pictures of the aftermath didn’t speak for themselves. A door busted off its hinges, stains from smoke grenades on the walls. “DEA, of course, none of our guys. Not even Art Crimes.” He had a shallow disdain for our colleagues in the FBI, who he often derisively referred to as ‘public sector’. In his view, they earned all the acclaim, while we mucked about authenticating and doing paperwork, and they only bothered to call us in once the mess was so bad they didn’t feel like touching it, so they could blame us if it didn’t all get cleaned up. Like in this case. I flipped the next page and found a crime scene photo, an older woman sprawled across a tile floor, blood tracing the grout etchings all the way out to the walls. I paused.

“Someone died?”

“Housekeeper. Collateral damage, apparently the SWAT idiots weren’t expecting her and shot on sight. Of course the family is suing, and they want to get as far from the whole thing as possible.” He rubbed his hands on his thighs, palpably excited. “But the lead was too good not to follow up. Hence tossing it to us.”

“What’s the target?”

“The Goldfinch.”

The entire floor fell out from the building, sending me crashing into the sub-basement. I adjusted my seating, leaning forward on my elbows. My first urge was to fake ignorance. What’s a goldfinch? I could smell smoke in the back of my nostrils, taste ash on my tongue. I swallowed. I was allowed to know this, expected to know this. If I didn’t say something soon, it would seem stranger than anything I could possibly say.

“Carel Fabritius?” I asked. My voice sounded reedy. “The little bird?”

“That’s the one,” he said. “Presumed destroyed, but-” He grinned. “Apparently not.”

“Apparently not.” I swallowed. I knew this could happen someday, maybe part of me was expecting it to. Deep down, why else would I have gotten into this job? It’s not like it paid much better than normal CPA work, and mostly it was just as tedious. But still, this was making sweat pool beneath the cuffs of my suit jacket.

“Normally, you know, I wouldn’t have a junior working a case this high profile,” he was continuing. “But since you have a personal history with the painting, I thought it might be appropriate.” He raised an eyebrow. My mouth was dry. What did he know? Was this all a sting, tricking me into confessing on tape before agents leapt out from the shadows and cuffed me? I hooked my ankles together beneath the table, trying to ground myself with pressure.

“Personal?” I whispered.

“Your mother passed away in the Museum bombing, correct? Where the painting was stolen?”

Of course. Of course that’s what he was talking about. I breathed out again.

“Yeah, I just- it’s hard to talk about.”

“Of course.”

“I’m happy to take this on. Just let me know what I need to do.”

As soon as the briefing was done I walled myself in my tiny office and took off my jacket and tie. I was sweating almost through my shirt, regardless of the pumping AC. As soon as I was in my seat I was gripping myself, knuckles white on my own elbows as I struggled to catch my breath. I’d been so stupid not to plan for the painting resurfacing, not to already have worked out an alibi. But it seemed inevitable this would all be traced back to me. Stupid little boy fleeing from his dead mother with a priceless secret. Stupid little boy found being employed in the same agency hired to track him down. The serpent eats its own tail. Stupid little boy.

My forehead thumped against the papers piled on my desk as my breathing evened. I was lucky, really. In fact, fate had set the table perfectly for me to get out of this. I was working my own case. And I was already twelve steps ahead of everyone else tracking the painting. I wondered who they thought had taken it. A fireman maybe, not realizing what he was grabbing? A museum employee fleeing through the ashes? Whoever had set the bomb in the first place. And they were nearly a decade behind, all that evidence lost to time. No-one now would be able to recall an ash-streaked boy with a suspiciously bulky bag under his arm. No-one but me. I held both the beginning and the end of the painting’s journey, all I had to do was piece the dots together.

My other choice was to sit idly while they circled in on me. And I couldn’t do that.

It had taken me months after I found the painting missing to even begin to reckon with it. I busied myself manically with New York, helping Hobie lug furniture, arranging and rearranging my bedroom as Hobie watched stoically from the doorway, or taking long meandering subway rides to distant corners of the city blasting music on my headphones. Walking down unfamiliar back alleys at night with only Popchyk for a companion, conspicuously not watching my back. In moments where I could find nothing to focus on I went blank, staring at the walls or the floor, mentally repeating the lyrics to my mother’s favorite songs, or counting to one hundred in Russian, anything that kept my mind too full to think about where the painting was.

Hobie, and every other adult I came into contact with, must have seen a misplaced, grief stricken teenager unwilling to come to terms with his losses. Luckily for me, that was exactly what they expected. And none of them, as much as they may or may not have cared, was impolite enough to ask me to talk about it.

When I did begin to think about it, usually while looking over Hobie’s books, it was only analytically. Another set of math problems I needed to make sense of, like the papers open in front of me. I’d never liked math before, found it cold and dry, but now the lack of feeling appealed to me. The idea of only one correct answer, one outcome to work towards. Lay out the factors, and lay them out again and again until they make sense.

My painting was gone. My father had stolen it from me without me even noticing- ransacking my room while I was probably high out of my mind somewhere in the desert. What had he hoped to find? More of my mother’s jewelry to steal, or some magical store of unwritten checks? It didn’t matter. It was typical of him. And he hadn’t even had the willpower to face up to it, grabbing the first similar sized object he could find (Boris wouldn’t notice a missing book, or if he did he’d probably assume he’d drunkenly misplaced it) and sneaking away with it without even the decency to warn me of his betrayal. The same way he’d slunk out of me and my mother’s apartment when he’d left the first time, pockets full of stolen goods, leaving nothing but our simmering rage and a loss as profound as his debts.

He would have been smart enough to know the value of what he’d stumbled across. More than I had at the time. And he would have known that it might actually cover his debts if he could foist it onto the right person.

And that was where the unknown factor came in. Who had he sold it to? Vegas was a massive city, and even bigger beneath the surface. Is that why he’d died heading East? Had he gotten a big enough payout from the goldfinch ( _ my  _ goldfinch) to start again, a new city, a new woman? Or was he still trying to find the right buyer when he died? I knew from work those kinds of deals took time to set up, weeks or months of careful negotiations, bringing in experts to authenticate. I could see her moldering in a storage locker somewhere, awaiting a buyer that would never come, risking liquidation when someone realized payments had stopped.

The mere mention of Storage Wars made my palms feel a little clammy.

Work helped keep my mind off of it. I got good at managing Hobie’s finances, discovering most of it was a confidence game. I liked being busy, always having something to turn over in my mind that wasn’t the glimmering eye of a small bird, or the tinny aftershock of an explosion, or the dry mouth glimpse of a pale and bony ankle. From Hobie’s bookkeeping I found others, majored in accounting over six years (I claimed the shop kept me busy, the truth was that half the time I was too strung out or mentally clogged to focus on classes, usually opting to drop out when I felt my grades start slipping.) But I was a good bullshitter, and a steady drip of adderall kept me just afloat until graduation, even if I still grind my teeth when I stop paying attention to the day.

A year after my CPA license came through, one of my bosses mentioned I might have a good sense for forensic accounting. It made sense to me. As a petty criminal myself, I liked knowing the nooks and crannies we hid in, in both the physical world and the financial. I started a few online classes, and found that their assessment had been right. Fraud went beyond backdating checks for Hobie, or passing off less than reputable antiques collections as stellar authenticators. I became fascinated with the world of fraudulent charities, shell corporations, and identity theft. To say nothing of offshore accounts, tax havens and elaborate write-offs that still technically stayed within legal bounds.

_ You're not getting away with shit _ , I wanted to whisper sometimes, as I peeled back layers of paperwork and audits, tracing hundreds of thousands to suspicious trusts placed in a cousin’s name, properties valued for millions where a simple google maps visit showed nothing but an overgrown shack. Which isn’t to say I particularly cared about financial fraud, just the problem-solving aspect. I was smarter than my father ever could have been. And Hobie’s books were air-tight.

My CFF certification came surprisingly easy, considering how much of a sandpaper crawl college had been. I guess I had the hang of it now. A knack for math and a junior (barely better than an intern) position at a very respectable firm, with high possibility of moving up in the ranks. As long as I was never drug-tested. Of course, if they implemented that, half the employee base would go with me. You would be surprised at what accountants got up to.

And now I was hunting myself. I opened my desk and rummaged through the messy folders and dried pens until I found the small tin of pills I kept stored at the bottom for days when it felt like going outside would make my heart beat so hard it would hammer out of my chest. I ground one with the bottom of my glass as I ran through the problem once more.

Factor One: My goldfinch was not destroyed, in some locked off private collection, or rotting somewhere. It was now on a public criminal record, the details of which I had yet to read.

Factor Two: My firm, with an unknown level of help from the FBI art crimes division, was supposed to find it. And I was supposed to help.

Factor Three: They were working from Miami, the end of the equation. But I was working both from the end and the beginning. I was three steps ahead.

I gathered the pill into a neat line, and snorted it. This was my only opportunity to erase myself from the record forever. And, more than that, to get my painting back. Whatever I had to do to get there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> exposition time baby


	3. Chapter 2

“Any plans for the weekend, honey?” I’d been cornered in the elevator by one of the firm’s secretary, a woman in her mid-50s who I swore played up her Kentucky accent, and who seemed to have an obsessive suspicion of me.

“Just reading through these files,” I said, gesturing at my satchel. It was tinted leather, a somewhat 70s style, and a gift from Hobie. It teetered somewhere between ‘young hip professional’ and ‘Village metrosexual out for brunch’, but I couldn’t deny its convenience. I made it a point never to wear the over-shoulder strap if there was a risk of seeing anyone from work. The secretary eyed me a little. “And going out with my fiancee.” I finished lamely.

“Well, you have fun with all that,” she said, with an air of disgust like I’d just confessed my excitement for the meth-fueled orgy I would be attending in lieu of church that sunday. The elevator dinged, and I happily escaped out onto the relatively empty plaza. I checked my watch. The delay to get my papers had slowed me down, and Hobie was probably already making dinner.

“Theo, is that you?” he called when I came in.

“Yeah,” I grunted, pulling my shoes off.

“I hope you haven’t eaten, it looks like I made enough mushroom risotto for four of us.”

“I’ll be right there as soon as I wash up.”

Upstairs, I laid the manila folders with all the information the FBI had given us about my painting (or at least all they’d decided I needed access to) across my quilted bedspread. Four folders, each with a small typed label on the top left corner.

MIAMI RAID

PREVIOUS INTEL

UPDATED INTEL (ONGOING)

BACKGROUND

That was it. That was all they had on her. I underlined the word Miami with my finger. What a tacky city. Worse than even Vegas, maybe. The sand and the sunscreen film and the shrieking drunk sorority girls. I’d never been, but Kitsey’s roommates were always clamouring to bring her down there with them. Escape the cold. Hit the beaches. Mimosas and the sunset. I knew it wasn’t the place for my painting, and I hoped she’d gotten out in time.

I knew the moment I opened one of the files I would be gone for hours, so I left them lying there and took a shower. Think of other things.

“And how was work?” Hobie asked at dinner. Under the table, Popchyk was resting his head on my feet, drooling gently onto my slipper.

“Good,” I said. “They’ve put me after some inheritance scheme from out in Hartford. Apparently some banker left his wife a Kandinsky with a real suspicious authentication trail.” The lie was automatic.

“How wonderful,” Hobie said, smiling. The pride he took in my work was heartbreaking sometimes. “Anything interesting yet?” I shook my head.

“I’ve barely opened the files, but there should be a good amount of drama. Younger wife, step-children, everyone fighting over the estate.”

“And it might all be over a fake? Thrilling.”

It had taken a while for Hobie to come around to my chosen career path. He found accounting incredibly dull, numbers impersonal and stoic, rejecting the kind of rigidity that had drawn me to accounting in the first place. But the truth about money, and following money, is that nothing could be more human. Men defrauded companies to pay for their children’s colleges. Politicians hid millions in their in-law’s deeply mismanaged Christian charities, and in court claimed they wanted to ‘keep it in the family’. I’d found fake credit lines set up in the name of infant cousins, tax fraud schemes that toppled in the wake of a nasty breakup, deceased grandmothers somehow in possession of three different posthumously managed bank accounts. Money is as personal as anything else that humans touch, and as fallible. And my job wasn’t about money, not really. Once I’d started working in art crimes, it was about tracing the path of a piece through the financial trail it left, like bloody handprints on the walls. 

It was only when I started showing Hobie how I could track any of the pieces he was working on, and bring their value up just through their financial history (look, this might have been owned by an Astor. That’s a solid five thousand more for a collector) that he began to be interested, then invested, then finally proud, and eager to show my career off to his friends. 

Granted, some of the connections I added to his pieces were tenuous at best, and relied on the testimony of long dead owners, but that was between me and my meticulously kept financial records. It wasn’t fraud, not really. It was just being optimistic about the historical record.

“Any big plans for the weekend?” I asked, sneaking a piece of mushroom under the table for a grateful Popchyk.

“I’m afraid not, unless a trip to the library counts. What about you and Kitsey? Have you been plotting about your getaway?”

I took a long drink from my wine glass. Kitsey had finally, after months of cajoling, convinced me to head out to her friend’s house in the Hamptons that weekend. I’d been tenuously looking forward to it, at least to the drinks and the sex, but now, with the files awaiting me upstairs? Now it would be absolute torture.

“If I make too many plans it wouldn’t be a getaway, would it?” I smiled. I sounded like a forty year old woman who swore on rosé. “It’ll be nice to be out of the city.”

Hobie gave me a look like he didn’t believe me for a second, and I met his gaze right back, and smiled again.

“Of course,” he said, and gathered up our plates. “Don’t forget to call me when you get there. I worry about you driving on the highway.”

Kitsey greeted me outside her friend’s house with a large smile. She looked perfect, of course, in her flowy little blue dress that would have looked almost beachy if she hadn’t paired it with impeccable hair and subtly expensive gold jewelry. When she saw me she smiled disapprovingly, and greeted me with a hug that kept us from touching too much.

“Darling, you’re all sweaty,” she said, miming a little pout and straightening my collar from across the table.

“I know, long drive,” I said, pulling my satchel from the backseat. Kitsey gave me an exaggerated pout when she saw it.

“Oh no, that better not be your work bag.”

“Don’t worry darling, I just have to do some reading,” I put my hand on the small of her back and we started up the drive. I could see people milling around on the patio.

“You said you weren’t going to be working.” She was still smiling, waving back at someone in the window. “This is the one time I’m going to show you off to my friends. I need you to be good.”

“I wasn’t going to go on your girl’s day with you anyway. You won’t even know I’m not sleeping by the pool.” We had reached the glass sliding door, and I heard someone squealing Kitsey’s name, and I leaned down to kiss her temple, and she laughed and gave me a side hug. By the time we crossed the threshhold, we were the perfect couple.

The house, and the people in it, were the kind of wealthy dullness that made me grind my teeth. Whitewashed walls, simple modern furniture, and gold embossed decorations that showed their expense in their boringness. No-one would pay fifty bucks for a sofa stand that would be destroyed if a terrier or a glass of red wine came within ten feet. Five thousand bucks, on the other hand, plenty of idiots were eager to cough that up.

The people weren’t better. Kitsey’s friends, of course, most of whom I vaguely knew from previous brunches and birthday parties, and their even more forgettable spouses and fraternity brothers. Since we were informal up here in the Hamptons, the usual slacks and sheath dresses had been discarded in favor of artfully frayed denim jeans, sunglasses pushed to the top of the head, and tastefully vintage band shirts. There was nothing like the taste of craft beer to make you hate Nirvana.

The conversation was inane, but the kind of inanity I could drift through completely automatically. Yes, me and Kitsey were hoping for a Spring wedding. Somewhere upstate, the location isn’t nailed down. I’d never get out of the office if not for her. I work in finance, sort of, can’t really get into it. Government stuff. She’s like a human golden retriever that one. You know I’ve never really gotten out to the West Coast, someday though. Thank God she took pity on me and scooped me up.

Upstairs, pretending to be taking a quick shower, I sat on the Kitsey and I would be sharing and stared at the files in my hand. The sound of splashing from the pool outside was mingling with the smell of air conditioning and over-bleached towels in the bathroom, making me feel a little dizzy. I ran my thumb up and down the edge of the manila folder, feeling the paper fray a little bit under my touch. I shouldn’t have brought these, shouldn’t have thought I could mix my carefully segmented life. Everything was falling apart.

I opened the Miami folder, looked again at the grainy print-out of the dead woman. Wedding ring on her finger. I flipped the page. A surveillance photo of a white van, beaten and scratched sides. None of this really had anything to do with me, with the part of the job I did. I flipped the paper again. Two pages now, possible suspects, known aliases. Possible connections. I skimmed the list. Mostly spanish, Miami locals. A few Russian, at the bottom. I could feel my throat move silently as I read the names, forming syllables I could still hear the pronunciations of.

I waited until I knew for certain Kitsey was asleep before sliding out from beside her and getting my clothes back on. It was maybe four am, the last few hours before dawn, and nearly everyone else in the house had burned themselves out on booze and sex. I did have to give it to Kitsey’s friends that they could cause a fair amount of ruckus when they felt like it. 

Rich kid parties. Downstairs was a mess, clothing tossed over the backs of chairs, remnants of meals that were started and then discarded scattered across the counters. Someone was sleeping on the couch, and they muttered something when I crept past them to open the door to the pool, but they didn’t wake up.

I hadn’t done anything harder than my usual daily allotment, even though it had been offered to me. Partly out of fear of slipping up, saying something I shouldn’t say to someone I shouldn’t talk to. And partly out of preparation for right now. The air was just chilled, smelling like the autumn that was right around the corner, and the lights from within the pool made everything a murky and wavy green. I could see the city in the distance, making the foggy water glow yellow, and the more and more scattered lights of the suburbs tracing their way to us.

I lit a cigarette, blowing smoke up to the muddy blue sky, and sat at the edge of the pool, my feet dangling in the water. Someone’s bikini top was abandoned at the bottom, long white ties swaying like artificial kelp. I hadn’t brought the file about the background of my painting down. There was nothing new they could tell me.

I started reading, the words a little hard to make out in the dim light. She was being used as collateral in drug deals. Forty or fifty thousand dollars worth of cocaine or heroin, every brick blood-stained, and still only a fraction of her real value. They weren’t sure what exactly had gone wrong, if the person selling the drugs had decided the painting was more valuable, or if the buyer had fucked up. Part of what we were trying to figure out.

The people who operated the Miami compound probably weren’t the masterminds. They smuggled the more simple black market goods, drugs and people. Art required a special finesse, a uniquely cultivated web of connections. They’d probably be looking to foist the painting off on someone as quickly as they could, probably already had. But who? And from whom had they gotten it in the first place? That was the real web we were plucking at, but all we had to go off was the dead fly stuck in it. 

I followed the edge of the paper to the shimmering water of the pool. My submerged feet looked deathly pale, wavering as the water lapped at my ankles. The taste of chlorine, the night sky, the way the tinny nosebleed scent at the top of my nostrils mingled with the cigarette smoke. It was all making me feel unmoored in time, unsure if I turned around I would see the Hamptons mansion or a dilapidated Vegas housing development. At night, the ocean and the desert were eerily similar, just an endless expanse of black, moonlight rippling across sand and salt, and the distant lights of travellers winching their way across the nothingness, heading to places you could only wonder at. Boris had been waiting in the back of my head all night, and now he was at the forefront. His boot, abandoned in the swimming pool or the way his wet black hair would hang over his face when he bent his head.

I was sure he was dead by now. People who ran that hot burnt themselves out. Dead, or imprisoned somewhere, or shivering beneath a coat on a bus stop bench, strung out halfway to Hell. I always hoped he made it to California, that at least he wasted himself away somewhere sunny and surrounded by beautiful people, instead in the cold or the wet or the achingly relentless heat of the desert. I hated sometimes how he hung around me still, anything from the smell of cheap teabags, or harsh florescents, or someone on the subway with dirty fingernails would remind me of him, make me imagine him older, leaner, chapped lips and trembling fingers. Made me remember how warm he would be next to me in the air conditioning. Sometimes I swore Popchyk could sense my flashbacks, would whine at me while I stare enraptured at the black and white movie on the television, my own hands warm against my thighs.

I blinked, and was back in the Hamptons. Someone inside had turned on the shower, and the sound of running water, shuffling feet, was grating against me. In the distance, I could see the light pink of sunrise glisten against the waves. I straightened my folders, tucked them to my chest, and went back inside. Kitsey probably hadn’t even realized I was gone.

  
  



End file.
